


All I Am

by duesternis



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: AU, Character Study, Character studies, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Nightmares, Pregnancy, Self-Harm, all relationships alluded to, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-01
Updated: 2015-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-07 04:07:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 9
Words: 5,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4248708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duesternis/pseuds/duesternis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>people are more than their shell</p><p>a look inside</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Max

Max talks to the Dog.

And that is it most of the time.  
There aren‘t many people to talk to in his life either way.  
Headstones seldomly reply.  
Not that Dog does, but he understands at least. Listens, head cocked to one side and tail wagging slowly.

Max‘ voice is rough with disuse and it gets worse by the day, he knows, can feel his throat get used to being worked only to swallow, not actually form words.  
He doesn‘t mind.  
Doesn‘t mind anything truly these days. There are worse things to lose than the voice.  
Things worth so much that you don‘t know their worth until they are gone forever.

The only time he misses it, misses talking to people, is when his leg hurts for no reason again and the nightmares, terrors even, get so bad he is scared to go to sleep at all.  
Staying awake to the neon of the TV running all day, people talking and flitting about in the box, behaving as if their life was the most important thing that had ever happened to the world. Universe even.  
Dog always curls up next to him on the couch and rests his head on Max‘ good knee. Gets his ears scratched and dozes off, drooling on Max‘ pants and wagging his tail.

Max envies him his easy dog-life.  
Takes him for extra long walks, nice and with lots of places where Dog can run free, chase squirrels and doves.  
Gets him his favourite treats and gives them away for almost anything. A wag of a tail, a happy yelp, a wet nose against his hand.  
It nearly feels like being alive again, like family and home.

They take long car rides together, Dog hanging his head out the passenger window, tongue flapping in the wind, Max humming along to the radio, one hand limply on the wheel, the other hanging out the window, tracing the wind like a body at his side. Static crackling in the old 2-way-radio, giving him the feeling of comrades driving next to him.  
Max knows the voices in that radio, and the names that go with them. All he misses are faces, and those were never that important for him.  
Sometimes they drive for days. Once even for weeks.

But Max always comes back home, to the flat his wife chose and decorated, to the empty nursery, the crib swinging softly in the wind. To the bedroom that still smells of her perfume, the closet still filled half with her clothes. To the empty side of the bed and the empty, empty flat.  
Every noise seems too loud and still not loud enough to fill the void. Max sometimes sits on the floor in the kitchen for hours and stares at the only picture of the three of them that he has.  
Him and his tiny family at the beach, so disturbingly happy.

If he cries, only Dog knows. And Max knows he is loyal to death, will never rat out a friend‘s secret.  
So he sometimes cries in the dark kitchen and lets Dog lap away the salt.

On weekends he stays in bed long, doesn‘t wear his brace and stares at the ceiling for entertainment.  
During the week he has several jobs he works, all part-time, all payed like shit, all work that needs nearly no talking. All work that needs nearly no socializing, no people.  
He is a recluse, a hermit. An old joke.  
There is no one to remind him of the old joke though. Dog, maybe, but he wouldn‘t do that to a friend. The loyal soul.

Max never opens the wardrobe-door that hides his old uniform from sight. The old uniform and the honorable discharge document and the small medal, pinned to the chest of the uniform. Sometimes just walking past the wardrobe makes him sick to the bone.

Sometimes he sleeps in the car, if the ghosts in the flat got too real, too close.  
Too alive.

Max talks to the Dog then, until they both fall asleep in the car, curled up in an old quilt.


	2. Furiosa

Furiosa isn‘t her real name.

Not the one her mother gave to her and whispered into her hair, when it still was long.  
Not the one her friends called her in school, waving her over to talk weekend-plans and boys.  
Not the one from a time gone past.

Furiosa is the name she gave herself, when she first swung her lithe body up into the cabin of her truck, her rig.  
The name she gave herself when it became clear that that was all that was left of her; fury.  
The name she gave herself when she first cut her hair and lost her arm to a careless mechanic.  
She forgave her rig.

Together they have collected more miles than enough to travel around the whole world twice. Together they will go on, until the world ends after all.  
Always alone, but talking to her colleagues over the static of the lonely highways.  
The Ace.  
Morsov.  
Changing others.  
And sometimes they have a listener. A silent one, playing the radio in the distance, listening in on their talks, complaints about gas-prices and bad motorway station food.  
Listening, never engaging in it all.  
Furiosa affectionately calls him the Mute in her head. Searches for him in the trucker-crowds all over the highways. Never sure what she looks for, if she even wants to find him.  
The way he breathes reminds her of her mother. Slow and steady, with a hint of anger in it.

Furiosa never tells anyone that she misses her mother like the sea would miss the beach, where it not there every day, always.  
She has a picture of herself and her mother in her wallet, sealed in a waterproof bag, folded down the middle.  
She never takes it out, never looks at it.  
It‘s burned into her eyes, into her brain. The long hair of her mother, braided and hanging over one shoulder, her eyes alight with joy, green grass around them. Furiosa is maybe six in the picture, hair long and flying wild in the wind.  
She‘s grinning openly, innocently.  
Whenever she closes her eyes now she can see herself and her mother standing in that lush green, forever smiling.  
It‘s a dream she can‘t ever return to.  
That green doesn‘t exist anymore.

Sometimes she wakes in her cabin, static crackling and Furiosa knows she dreamt of death.  
Then she is glad for the breathing of the Mute mixing with the static, becoming the static, white noise. She‘s never quite sure if she imagines it, or if he really is there, breathing in his own truck somewhere on the long winding highways.  
But even if she just imagines him in those nights, sleep comes easier then.

Furiosa always makes sure her truck is locked.  
Once, on her first ride, she hadn‘t locked the doors and someone had gotten inside in the middle of the night.  
She had had the luck of getting help when she roared angrily into the dark.  
The Ace showed her more than a few tricks to live life a bit more comfortably on the roads, in the rig.

Not that she would want to swap it for an easy life in a city, with a mindnumbing routine.  
Furiosa loves the thrill of the drive, of getting her rig filled with goods and taking them on a journey through ever changing landscapes.

She cuts her hair herself, once a month in the showers of motorway stations and cheap motels.  
Sleeps in a real bed from time to time and ignores all jeering comments from the thick, sad men that share their trucker-stories over a beer and cold mashed potatoes.  
She sits with them, never a part of them. Listens quietly and scoffs soundlessly before leaving the tables behind and getting the road back under her wheels.

Furiosa isn‘t her real name, but with the anger sitting under her skin it very well could be.


	3. Nux

Nux shaves his head.

The first time he does it, he isn‘t even in school yet.  
He has seen a boy on TV with no hair and he loved it.  
This is what he wanted to be. Free space, clean.  
A canvas.

Nux gets his first tattoo with fifteen, faking a letter of consent from his parents and getting a crowbar tattooed on his arm.  
He wants his arms to be as strong as a crowbar.

By sixteen he knows everything there is to know about cars and Nux‘ tattoos count more than ten. He‘s always adding to them.  
Small pictures, all black and white, edged under his skin, staying there forever as visual reminders that all is a machine and all can be fixed in the right hands.  
Nux still waits for the right hands to fix him.

Waits at night and during the day, waits in school and in the bus, waits at home and in the streets where he aimlessly walks, following people for some time, before finding another person to follow.  
Some days he follows a man with a dog for hours. The man has a brace on his leg. It never creaks.  
Then a woman with cropped hair and a metal-arm for half an hour, before she vanishes in a crowd.  
Nux curses her for slipping from his hands.  
He never follows men with brutal hands and women with sad eyes.

Nux gets his biggest tattoo started on his nineteenth birthday. A motor, a V8 on his chest, to remind his heart that it keeps him alive.  
Needs to keep him alive, purring and running like a motor.  
Sometimes, at night, when the darkness is endless and Nux is so alone, more alone than anyone else in the world, he fears his body is giving out on him.  
Then he recites all the parts of a V8 to his body, just to remind it of its work.  
Of the fuel it needs to pump through him.

Nux talks too much. Talks too much and too fast and always to strangers.  
People he meets for a few minutes.  
He never talks much, or important things, with his parents. He loves them, yes, but they don‘t understand him.  
The easy camarederie with another teenage-boy on the bus feels deeper than any love his mother ever showed him.  
The sneer a girl gives him when he talks too loud and too fast at her makes Nux‘ shiver under the attention.  
Nux doesn‘t talk to people at school.

He is a shadow there, head shaved, tattoos hidden under long sleeves and scarves.  
The other boys stare in the locker room, when they change there.  
They stare at his pale skin, the pictures drawn in it with black, grey ink, sometimes still mingled with a hint of red, still fresh and swollen, alive.  
Nux loves the hot feeling of healing.  
Loves the hot feeling of being stared at with hungry eyes by that one boy he doesn‘t even know the name of.

The boy is a year older, maybe two, and he stares at Nux as if Nux knows the secrets of the universe and will crack and tell them, if eyes just bore into his skin long enough.

They talk to each other the first time over the broken down car of the boy. He fixes it and they don‘t stop talking until stars reach for the moon high above them.

Nux takes him to the tattoo-shop and the boy gets his first tattoo, a slit down his ribs, exposing inked bones, staring at Nux all the time, while the needle injects black ink into his body time and time again.

Nux builds his first car from scratch and he knows he will never do anything else than take parts that no one wants anymore and build beautiful, strong things from them, that will conquer the world and all of time.  
He knows it with the same certainty that he knows his heart will never stop beating at night, now that the V8 on his chest is finished and keeping him alive.

Nux shaves his head and he also does so for Slit, careful to not cut his skin with the razor.


	4. Slit

Slit breaks things out of joy.

Watches them dwindle and die and get destroyed by his hands with childish joy.  
It gives him the feeling of endless power, dawning on the horizon of his life, only there for him to grab.

He starts calling himself Slit after he breaks his own skin for the first time.  
Knows that it won‘t be the last by far.  
It‘s the ultimate sign of power, that he overcomes his own brain, hurts himself and then is strong enough to erase what he did in a matter of weeks. Leaving only a faint line.

Slit basks in the fear he imposes in others.  
His one eye is constantly bloodshot, as if someone hit him too hard on the side of the head.  
Slit wants to carve more red eyes into his body, to make sure people know that he sees all, but decides against it when he sees the pale white inbetween black ink on that boy in the locker room.

He needs not red lines, he needs ink in his body, beautiful stark black lines forming all those things he feels churning under his skin.  
Needs ink in his body as badly as he needs approval in secret, dark rooms with shaking hands and hurried breaths, praying to all the gods that will hear him, that he finds someone who approves of all of him.

Slit thinks there is nothing worthy in himself until Nux‘ eyes fall on him and can‘t seem to get pried off again, not even with the most violent of means.  
Slit slits his own face open to show Nux that there is nothing beautiful there.  
Nux touches the wounds, blood spilling over them both and cries, stammering that it is the most beautiful thing he ever saw. It makes all the air in the world too heavy to fill his lungs again.

Slit believes him and Nux touches the scars with worship every day.  
He allows it with closed eyes, breath sticking in his throat.

Slit fights ruthlessly against opponents that seem far out of his league and angrily against people that stand no chance against him.  
Sees it as a personal insult, when people don‘t stand up in a fight.  
He is all about fights, about anger brought to the boiling point and spilling over his skin in hot waves.  
He‘s control and fear in human form, making children cry with a twitch of his scarred face.

The only child that never cries again in sight of his face is Nux and some nights Slit hates him for it with a fervor that makes him hold his breath.  
Their blood mingles on the sheets and if Slit cries in the dark, then no one knows.

He will still do anything for Nux, jump from a building and shoot a man in the open, if Nux asks him to.  
Slit doesn‘t question it, wouldn‘t dare to desecrate the wonderful machine that is Nux‘ body and mind with his mindless, tumbling questions.  
He admires Nux in the dark, in the light, in all states of dress and undress and all emotions.  
Takes pleasure in making Nux angry and getting slapped across the face with a tool or a hard fist.

Slit doesn‘t take Nux lightly and laughs into the face of anyone who dares to.  
Watches them shiver under the anger that can shine bright in the blue eyes Slit knows like the ink in his own skin.  
Watches them split open on Nux fists, blood painting the pale skin a healthy colour.  
Watches them writhe under the words Nux knows, more than half of them escaping Slit altogether, but what does it matter when all he needs to say can be said with his body?

Slit breaks things out of joy, but he is broken by Nux again and again, enjoying it more than breaking things.


	5. Angharad

Angharad decides to keep her child.

She‘s young, yes.  
She‘s beautiful, yes, and wonders sometimes what that point has to do with her keeping her child.  
Because it is her child and no one else‘s.  
It is her body that swells and grows heavy.

She barely finishes school, belly round and eyes glued to it, as if she as a person disappeared.  
They all speak in hushed whispers of what happened to her and she whispers Rape whenever she passes too quiet groups in the hallways.  
Angharad tells herself she isn‘t afraid to name what happened to her.

Isn‘t afraid to go to the police again and again and tell them the name of her rapist.  
The father of her child. She scoffs at that idea and cups a hand over her belly.

This is her child and she will protect it with teeth and nail.

A woman with cropped hair in the supermarket looks at her belly with a hint of wonder in her eyes, a slow smile ghosting over her face and Angharad feels pride.  
She is harboring life, helping another human being be born.  
It feels good and she walks straighter.  
A man walking his dog avoids looking at her swollen belly, so soon until she will hold her boy in her arms, and she wonders what happened to him to make him look that haunted. Pity is the wrong word for what she thinks, but there is no other.  
A pair of boys, heads shaved and tattoos glinting on their skin, nudge each other, pointing at her belly and the scars on her face.  
She glares at them with all the hatred she can muster up for stupid boys.  
The taller one looks at his big boots and Angharad nods, the other one just laughs and crudely tugs his friend away.  
Angharad feels a spike of maternal affection towards that unknown boy and smiles at him as he follows his friend. He smiles back, whispers something under his breath and Angharad is torn about not understanding him.  
She sees him again in the hallways of school and wonders why she never noticed him before. His eyes light up when he sees her and his friend stays silent.

Her friends touch her belly warmly, calling her stupid and brave in the same sentence, brushing her hair and defending her choice like their last scrap of decency. They go with her to the hospital, to her doctors, to the police.  
A small huddle of girls dressed in white, that felt the same thing being torn out of their bodies.  
They share history and pain, laughter and tears.  
Angharad keeps them close and protects them with all that she got, feeling more like a mother by the day.

Men that look at her body as if it were something to eat make her skin crawl and she feels protected by the memory of the hidden fury behind the eyes of that woman in the supermarket.  
By the shaking hands of the father of her child when she told him she would make his life hell on earth if he ever came close to her child.  
By that and the kicks of her boy in her belly.

She sings to him whenever she can, tells him things about the world he will come to live in, terrible things and beautiful things, because the world is both and it would be unwise to keep one half of it from her child.  
When she first holds him in her arms he is heavy and she wonders how she carried that weight around all day long without noticing it.  
His hands are tiny and strong and she loves him.

Angharad decides to keep her child and she holds his hand all night long.


	6. Toast

Toast carries a gun in her purse.

Carries it to shoot men that want to violate her in the balls.  
Carries it, so she can wear her shoulders straight and walk where she pleases, no fear in her heart.

She cuts her hair after that awful, disgusting man had wormed his way into her body. He had told her how beautiful her hair was, while moving above her, his sweat dripping into her face.  
She cuts it herself in the hospital, hot angry tears spilling over her bruised cheeks.  
Long hair made her feel weak and ugly now. She didn‘t want to feel weak ever again.

Toast starts reading any- and everything she can get to, drinking knowledge up like a parched man would swallow water.  
There is nothing she doesn‘t want to read, nothing she doesn‘t want to know, no matter how tepid, how gruesome.

She graduates best of her year, spilling words and facts left and right, arguing with teachers about things she supposedly doesn‘t know shit about.  
She doesn‘t let anybody talk down to her ever again.  
Writes Toast the Knowing in her yearbook and in everyone else‘s too, when they ask her to sign. It‘s not her real name, but it feels right.  
Angharad calls her that and she knows people better than anyone else Toast knows.  
Toast would follow her to the end of the world.

Her and her little boy that Angharad still hasn‘t named yet, even though he will come out so soon now.  
Toast hands her name after name and Angharad never says yes or no. But there is a glint in her eyes and Toast knows that Angharad has a name she wants to call him, something special.  
Toast knows a lot of things and keeps quiet about them.  
That‘s what she‘s good at, keeping quiet.

When people ask her what she wants to be, now that she‘s not longer a school-girl, she says Teacher with her chin squared and lifted.  
No one fights with her about it. If they would dare she would utterly destroy them, word and sentence.  
Toast will not let anyone decide for her ever again.  
She has swallowed all that can be swallowed, took pain that was given stoically and now she will strike back, if anyone ever hurts her again.

A woman driving the biggest truck Toast has ever seen looks at her and she smells a kindred spirit in the hard eyes, but just watches the woman take her truck out into the street. A cloud of dust and noise swallows her up and Toast regrets not talking to her.  
A boy with a red eye runs into her and Toast holds on to her purse, not letting him tear it from her grip.  
Another boy, tall and lanky drags the red-eyed away and looks at her unreadable. Toast sees them in school and sneers. They sneer back.  
A man walking his dog flinches away from her when she intercepts his path walking home and the guilt is overpowering. She apologizes but he is gone, his dog at his heels, before she can finish her sentence.  
Only a dusty print left in her memory.

Toast doesn‘t tell anyone about the dreams she sometimes has of the man. Of any man she ever met.  
They all end the same and Toast wakes, feeling powerful.  
She doesn‘t like them and will never do again, not after what happened to her, to her friends.  
They cannot be trusted she whispers in the dark at night before she falls asleep.

Toast carries a gun in her purse and she isn‘t afraid to use it.


	7. Dag

Dag plants seeds.

Like the one planted in her.  
Tiny and alive and poisoning her from the inside.  
At least some days.  
The others she feels like good strong soil, keeping a tree alive. Angharad says it‘s normal and she will maybe grow to love the seed in her belly.  
If not, it‘s better to get rid of it.

Dag thinks about it long and hard and waters her plants and decides she doesn‘t want to be a killer, doesn‘t want to tear life out of her belly and let it die in this world without having felt love even once.  
She will love this thing and hate whoever hurt her enough to make her consider killing an innocent child out of fear.  
So she decides it is a girl and calls her Hope and binds her flowers for the hair she doesn‘t have yet and plants her a tree in the garden, so that, when she is old enough to have a swing, she has her own tree with her very own swing.

Dag loves her more with every day that passes and loves herself for loving a thing born out of hatred and violence.  
Forgets the voice of the man that had forced himself on her and is happier than before.

She sells a big bouquet of flowers to a man that looks so incredibly sad and haunted, that she gives him a bag of seeds for free. Plant them and find happiness in the life you give she says and he looks at her long and hard and grumbles Thank You in a voice rough and gruff, like sand over stone.  
Dag smiles at him and his face scrunches up, as if he hasn‘t smiled for a long time.  
He comes regularly and buys seeds, sometimes flowers again. His dog likes cookies.  
She sells grass-seeds to a woman, and a flat dish for the dashboard of her truck. Helps her set it all up and the woman leaves with clear instructions of care.  
Waves after the truck and wonders why the woman only wanted grass, green and lush, no flowers.  
Later Dag gets a photo in the mail of a small patch of grass growing on the dashboard of a truck, a tiny spider building a net between the blades.  
It says Thank You on the back.  
Two boys come inside the shop and look at the flowers and plants, touching them, talking to each other in quiet voices and Dag leaves them alone.  
They buy nothing but come again.  
Sit in the greenhouses for hours and steal fruit from the gardens. Dag lets them and stays quiet about it.  
Dag‘s friends like to sit in the shop, between green lush life and talk quietly about what they want to do in life. About that they need to stay together and have each other‘s backs, if they want things to go smoothly.  
If they want things to go at all.

Dag vows silently to never abandon the shop, make it a safe haven for all women and men that were hurt like they were.  
Make it a thing of life and love.  
She strokes her belly and whispers Hope and imagines movement inside, shies away from asking Angharad when she first felt her boy move inside her.

Dag will know when it happens and she will cry about it.  
Be scared and happy and thrilled that she is being mother earth to a human seedling.

She grows an all new flower and calls it Hope, plants them around the tree she planted for her girl and waters them, a hand over her belly and a smile on her lips. She knows that this is what is good and right and she will keep doing it until all breath leaves her body.

Dag plants seeds and watches them grow, like her belly grows with Hope.


	8. Capable

Capable never bears children.

She knows that she won‘t do it the second she sees Angharad grow thick, emptying her stomach in the dirty school-stalls.  
She rather learns more about children than her friends, than the people surrounding her.  
Learns how fast they grow, what they need to eat, what sicknesses they can get and which ones they need to get.  
She teaches herself all there is to know about bringing them to light.  
She teaches herself all there is to know about living life on her own two feet, about fixing things she thought unfixable only weeks prior.

Looks at herself in the mirror and wears her hair in braids, keeping it out of her face, keeping it out of her hands, but never keeping it out of her life, like Toast does. Capable would rather cut off her arm than her hair.  
But she doesn‘t let people touch it anymore.  
It‘s hers, like her body and it‘s hers to decide who gets to touch it.

She lets a man touch it, after his dog ran her over and he helped her up.  
He carefully cups her head in one big hand, making sure she is alright. He doesn‘t talk to her, only to his dog.  
She lets a woman touch it, obviously drunk, but she says her mother‘s hair had been red and she looks so heartbroken that Capable lets her card her strong fingers through the locks.  
She lets a boy in school touch it, finding him shaking in the girl‘s bathroom, skin sweaty and pale. He doesn‘t tell her what he took but she holds him through it and he fists her hair so desperately it hurts. She lets him.

He whispers Nux when she asks him his name and she remembers that Toast said she knows things.  
Capable asks her what that means and Toast says it‘s Latin and means A worthless Thing.  
She meets the boy again and asks him who called him that first and he says my father, Capable holds him and he doesn‘t complain.

She doesn‘t like Nux‘ friend, a mean feral boy with slit up cheeks and anger issues, that looks at her as if she stole his only valuable possession.  
When she asks him about it, he just spits at her and turns around, anger burning in his fists and shoulders.  
Nux stays silent when she asks him about it, only speaks after hours of silence. Says I am and looks at his hands.  
Capable holds them and swears to take care of this boy.

Swears to take care of her friends, keep them safe and real and especially Angharad, who calls her in the middle of the night, tears in her voice and pleads with Capable to come and help her stay alive.  
She comes as fast as she can and holds her best friend in the dark, swollen belly between them, tears in the dark and hatred in her heart. Hatred for anyone who ever thought it was okay to hurt someone like this and simply walk away.

Capable swears to herself that she will never simply walk away from anything that she can change.

Nux looks at her with wide eyes when she tells him that at school and looks over his shoulder at his friend staring at them both with hatred and fear in his mismatched eyes. Capable waves the boy over and he takes his time to look at Nux and whatever he sees there makes him come over and Capable talks to them long and low and they all agree to come to each other whenever any one of them needs help with something they can‘t fix on their own.

Capable never bears children, but she surrounds herself with them.


	9. Cheedo

Cheedo is always afraid.

Fear follows her, wherever she goes.  
It‘s like an animal sitting on her shoulder, croaking in her ear.  
It‘s like a pebble in her shoe that she can‘t get out.  
It‘s a shadow under her feet that grows every day, threatening to swallow her up.

Cheedo keeps to the back of groups, to the back of a circle, to the back of her friends. Hides behind the girls that have experienced so much more bad than she and still are so strong, so beautiful, so honest.  
She feels bad about it at night, doesn‘t sleep, keeps herself awake and sits on the floor for hours, staring at the dark outside her window and waiting for the sun to rise and give her a peak of confidence again.

A man she sees in the cemetery gives her hope.  
He sits before a grave, a dog at his side and cries. Cheedo never saw a man cry before and it gives her hope, that not all men are cold and cruel, that not all men are scary and to be feared.  
She stays and watches him until it gets dark around them.  
A woman she sees in the city gives her hope.  
She is tall and wears her hair shorter than Toast, she is strong and still beautiful, muscled and her left arm is made from metal. Cheedo stares in awe and the woman looks at her with blank eyes.  
When Cheedo smiles she smiles back faintly and it gives Cheedo hope that kindness and strength are not exclusive.  
Capable with her two boy-friends gives her hope.  
They are a bad fit, they argue and scream and shout and still they carry each other, when the day ends and they are tired and hurt.  
They laugh at the smaller boy‘s crude jokes and admire the taller boy‘s cars, the ink they both have under their skin.  
They dote on Capable and the taller one can talk about her for hours, never repeating a point. The smaller one only looks in those hours, but Cheedo can sense nothing evil from him and it gives Cheedo hope that friendship and love are stronger in the end.

She thinks of Dag in these moments. Dag and her unborn girl she already named Hope.  
Cheedo feels good then and wonders if she will ever have a baby-girl. A family of her own, someone to love and trust.

If at night she sometimes thinks that it would have been better if no one had stopped the man trying to rip her clothes apart with his big hands, that she would have been stronger for it all, if it had happened, then she keeps quiet about it and just begs that these thoughts may never come back.  
They do.

But she is still whole and it is the best thing that ever happens to her when her friends tell her that she is the only untainted thing they know and that they will kill anyone who tries to blacken that.  
They say it with so much power in their voices, that she can‘t help but believe them.  
Dag names a flower after her and calls it Fragile. Cheedo cries and they hug her and promise her that all will be alright.

Angharad lets Cheedo hold her boy and she cries again, doesn‘t know why, just knows that there is too much sadness in the world and someone has to cry about it, so she might aswell do it.  
They all laugh when she says that and hug her.

Cheedo is always afraid, but she still stands up and does what feels right.


End file.
